


If You Are Happy

by orphan_account



Category: DRAMAtical Murder - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, May add tags as it goes on, Minor Character Death, Non Graphic mention of underage, One-Sided Relationship, POV Second Person, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-31
Updated: 2015-05-28
Packaged: 2018-03-20 13:12:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3651621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wim is seven and a half when his parents die and he and his younger brother, Theo, are sent to live with a relative. With no access to their inheritance until he turns 18, Wim feels as if nothing in his life is under his control. The only thing that he has left is his baby brother. He promises to Theo (and himself) that he's going to take care of him, and that he'll make sure Theo never gets hurt.</p><p>Some promises are harder to keep than to make.</p><p>A story set in the universe of the game, but with a canon divergence in Noiz's childhood.  Alternately titled: Wenn du fröhlich bist.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Everyone, Everyone is going home

_Alle Leut', alle Leut' geh'n jetzt nach Haus'_  
_Alle Leut', alle Leut' geh'n jetzt nach Haus'_  
_Grosse Leut', kleine Leut',_  
_Dicke Leut', dünne Leut'_  
_Laute Leut', leise Leut'  
_ _Alle Leut', alle Leut' geh'n jetzt nach Haus'_

_Alle Leut', alle Leut' winken sich zu,_  
_Sagen auf wiedersehen,  
_ _Das war heut' wieder schön.  
_ _Alle Leut', alle Leut' winken sich zu._

***

It’s 3:12 A.M and you shouldn’t be awake right now but you are, so you hear the sound of the knock on your door. You think about how pointless that is and, almost as if hearing your thoughts, the knock turns into the sound of a lock clicking open. Light spills into the room and you ignore it, curling into a tighter ball under your covers.

The help never come to bother you at this time. They know better than to do that. You vaguely find it odd, but you don’t dwell on that. Maybe the day had come when your parents decided to pack you up and ship you out to go live somewhere else, on some other continent, with some other family. Maybe the walls that separated you from them were not enough to keep you out of their thoughts. Maybe out of sight, for them, was not nearly enough to keep their mistake of a son out of mind.

No, that wasn’t it at all.

The person at the door comes over to sit on your bed side. You know because you hear the creak of the mattress, and hear her place a hand on the lump you make in the blankets. Uncurling from where you lay, you look up at the maid- her name is Leah, you think- and notice the taught lines of her face. She’s unhappy.

Leah apologizes for waking you. There’s been an accident, she explains, looking as if she wants to reach out and touch you, but thinking better of it. Your parents, young master, she continues.  
Your parents are dead. 

You listen in numb silence as Leah explains that the car they had been riding in had broken down along the train tracks in town. By some freakish coincidence, the train has been just on time, and they were running late. Father had been in a rush to get home, no doubt. A horrible accident. A terrible tragedy.

Leah doesn’t believe her own words, you can tell from her faltering tone. But you don’t bother to call her out on her lie. You grasp at the bottom of your pajama pants and gaze at her evenly; her nervous gaze is fleeting in the brief silence which she allows you, perhaps expecting some sort of response. 

When she realizes that there will be none, Leah says that you’re to be sent to live with your uncle in Pellworm*, you and Theodore both. An uncle you’ve never met, who doesn’t speak any Japanese, and doesn’t carry any weight in the family- or at least, that’s what you’ve been told.

You ask about your brother, but Leah says they won’t wake him till morning. Why did she wake you up now, then? Leah smiles sadly, and says she wanted to let you know before he did. She says that she thinks you’ll have to be strong for your brother now. She says that you’re older and that your life has already seen hardship- but that Theo is small and fragile and that this will hit him harder than you. She says that Theo depended on your parents more than you did and you know what she means. You know she wouldn’t say that your parents loved Theo more than they loved you. And that’s fine. 

Leah isn’t obligated to, but she sits with you and tells you she knows what she’s asking isn’t fair- that none of this is fair. Her kindness comes as a surprise to you, and through the haze of your thoughts you don’t really know how to process it right now. You watch as she places a pale, thin hand on your knee, and asks you how you’re feeling. You answer honestly when you tell her that you don’t feel anything. 

There isn’t a word in your vocabulary to describe the way she looks at you as she leaves the room. Uncomfortable, maybe, but you don’t really know what that means, not really. Leah tells you that you can sleep in your old bedroom if you want, but you decline. You’ve grown accustomed to this bed, and you have a feeling that this is the last time you’ll be sleeping here for a long time. Whatever happens, there’s nothing in this giant house which you’ll want to bring with you, and nothing in this house to which you’ll want to say goodbye.

***

In the morning you still feel numb. You feel numb when you go downstairs and eat breakfast at the table. You feel numb as you watch the help scurry around the kitchen, talking in low voices, _of_ you but not _at_ you; about your parents, about their jobs, about the house. Numbly you watch the different expressions on their faces, and you try to understand what they might be feeling right now, but you fail. You can’t find it in yourself to feel anything right now. Like the affliction that dulls your senses has reached in and taken hold of your emotions, too. 

Then Theo comes down to the kitchen, clutching his blanket and smiling, and it all changes. He looks at you and his warm hazel eyes light up and he beams. When he smiles like that, he looks exactly like your mother. The same wide, soft hazel eyes, the same sharp nose. Only you’d never seen her smile quite like that, and Theo absolutely _beams_ , he reaches out to hug you, to touch you, pudgy hands gripping your arms and your hands and your cheeks, as if to affirm that you are in fact real, are in fact there. 

Suddenly, nothing becomes everything. It’s far too much and the heavy weight on your chest is what you think might be pain. It’s hard to breath, and you can’t manage to say anything at all. 

Suddenly, you start to cry. 

Theo is startled and several maids come to calm you down, but you just grip tightly onto the back of Theo’s shirt, refusing to let him go. You can’t feel his tiny hands on you, nor can you see his face with your nose pressed into his hair; but you can hear him gurgle something unintelligible and break into a slightly softer round of wails that nearly match yours in volume and despair. 

You are holding your baby brother for the first time in six months, and you don’t want to ever let go. He is crying because you are crying, the most natural reaction for a five year old. You are crying because you cannot feel your brother’s touch and oh how you wish that you could, because you missed him so much, and because you are seven and a half and your parents are dead and this little boy clutched tightly in your arms is the last thing that you have left in the world. 

If nothing else, you have Theo again. Tiny baby Theo with a quivering lip and big, bright hazel eyes. Tiny Theo with bleach blonde hair and freckles on his nose and the back of his hands. You are his now, just as much as he is yours- and that’s fine.


	2. May there always be sunshine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> cw: death (the attendance of a funeral)  
> illustration at bottom of chapter by me

_Immer lebe die Sonne,_

_Immer lebe der Himmel,_

_Immer lebe die_

_Mutti Und auch ich immerdar!_

 

_***_

You didn’t expect the next time you spent with your brother to be such a tearful event- but then, you didn’t really ever expect to see your brother again. Everything is a little hard for you to understand right now and you feel kind of like you’re walking through a field of eggshells, but however hard it may be for you, you can only imagine how hard it must be for your baby brother.

The concept of death was simple, for you. The first time you’d ever seen something die was the time a boy in your class brought a frog into school with him for show and tell. It was a fat, stupid looking thing, with slimy green skin and oddly proportioned limbs. He held it in both fists and its large white eyes would bulge out of its head every time he gave it a squeeze. He squeezed and squeezed the poor frog, until eventually it stopped croaking, and the desperate boy squeezed the still animal once more in an attempt to revive it. Its white eyes popped right out of its head. The room was filled with the screeches of the other students as they clambered to get away from the eyeless cadaver.

At the time, you hadn’t understood what caused the frog to stop living, but you understood that it no longer would ribbit or hop around the boy’s desk. You understood that death meant that something stopped living, and that they wouldn’t ever come back again. You watched your classmate and several teary-eyed girls gather around a small hole in the playground, and lower a small tattered shoe box in with heavy sighs. The dismal sight was more annoying to you than grief-provoking. You knew that your teacher had thrown the frog away during lunch. You’d seen her do it. Whatever was in that box was just a sad reminder of a little boy’s carelessness, a poor homage to be paid to sodded Croaks-no-more.

The funeral you attended for your parents was nothing like that. The sad faced school girls were replaced by somber faced adults, standing close together and dressed in all black. The procession had a likeness to a murder of crows, looming in a tree together, silent and still. It gave the same kind of feel in the air, a dark twisting feeling in any onlookers stomach. No sounds but the voice of a mourner up at the altar, rattling on about what would be missed and remembered even in death. It was nothing but white noise to you.

Your parents were buried together. In a plot sight not far from their estate, with no other graves in sight- there were two rectangular holes in the ground, like yawning mouths opened up in the earth. Waiting to swallow up your parents whole. The coffins were simplistic black, and you knew without being told what they were. Seeing the two coffins being lowered together into the ground, eaten up by the deep orifice in the hillside… the sight was a little frightening to you, and you held tightly onto Theo’s hand. His eyes were swollen and his nose was red, so you knew he’d been crying. Come to think, maybe his sobs had been some of the white noise that had failed to penetrate the deaf ears you’d adopted for this morbid event. Unlike your brother, you felt absent of the swell of emotion inside you. It made you wonder if you ought to cry, if that was what was expected of you. Perhaps it was just another normalcy that you failed to properly grasp, another thing that you couldn’t do right. You didn’t have anyone to ask about this sort of thing.

As you watched Theo rub at his face, you wondered about the questions he had that he was too afraid to ask. _Why are mommy and daddy not coming back? Where have they gone? Why are we burying them in the ground? Won’t daddy be mad he has to miss work if he’s buried in the ground?_ You didn’t have any answers to those. No amount of straightforwardness could make up for the lack of conceptual understanding. All that you could do was assure him that you were here, and that you weren’t going anywhere. That you’d always be here. That you would keep him safe and love him twice as much to make up for mom and pa, that you would make sure he never had to want for anything, and would hurt over nothing.

If there was one thing in life that you refused to fail, it was Theo.

You wanted to relay these things to him by touch, but without any measure of how much pressure would be comforting and how much would be painful, you had no idea how. You couldn’t feel Theo’s fingers tightly grip your hand, but for once in your life, you think that you could understand his pain.

 

***

 

Like shadows, the people in black swept from the grave site. None of them stopped to say anything to you or to Theo, and you preferred it that way. You glared fiercely at anyone who tried to come close, and attempted to physically block your brother from the words whispered on the air.

‘Those poor kids. They had everything and now they have nothing. What a horrible thing to happen.’

It made you angry. You didn’t really understand, and it made you furious. Why did they care what happened to you? Why did they come to mourn your parents, who you’re surely they barely knew? You hadn’t met most of these people a day in your life. Their gray faces held no clarity for you. These white faced specters were all the same, features melding together from one to the next to create an unfamiliar wall of gray in your memory. It hurt to think that perhaps these strangers might have known your own parents better than you did. You wondered if they’d ever even mentioned you to them. If your mother had ever boasted about you in conversation, if your father had ever affectionately referred to you as ‘my boy’ or a ‘chip off the old block’ like you’d heard him do for Theo. You can’t even remember your parent’s last words to you.

But they were soon gone and out of your thoughts. The two of you were lead back to your house and told it was time to leave. Your things had been collected; all matters of the will had been accounted for. Neither of you had anything to say, and you felt a sort of resignation to the fate ahead of you. In a way, it almost felt reassuring. Like there was something over the horizon to look forward to, no matter how dark and uninviting the future may feel. You watch the tears fall down your brother’s face, turning his cheeks a ruddy color and making his dark eyelashes clump together, as the two of you say farewell to the home you once knew for one last time.

There was little sadness in leaving for you. This house had always felt like a cage, more than your home. You wondered if Theo had attachments to this place that you couldn’t begin to relate to. If he had memories that welled inside him as the estate grew smaller and smaller behind you. You didn’t really know how to talk to him about that sort of thing. There hadn’t been many words exchanged between the two of you in the past few days. But that was okay, you told yourself, because it was only a matter of time before things were quiet again, right? Once you got to your new ‘home’, things would adopt some kind of domesticity that you had missed out on over the past 6 months of your life. Things would work out for the better, this way. They had to.

It was Leah who accompanied the two of you from your car to the ferry that would take you to Pellworm. She carried your bags as the two of you gaped at the docking area before you. Neither of you had ever been to the sea before, so the seemingly endless expanse of blue held both wonder and fear for you. The air smelled strongly of salt, and behind the noise of the people milling back and forth you heard the distant call of a gull. Where the sea itself was a deep, dark blue, the sky contrasted it by being a more baby blue color. Only a few white clouds could be spotted in the distance, lying low on the horizon.

The ferry itself was a small white boat with stripes of blue on its side. Of course, to you, it seemed gigantic. A feeling of excitement welled inside of you as Leah gently guided the two of you on to deck. For a moment, you felt your anxieties wash away, as you leaned against the railing and wondered at the deep ocean- what lay beneath the calm surface, and if the water tasted just as it smelled.

Theo was not so lucky. The lurch of the boat as it pulled away from the dock seemed to unsettle him, as he clung tightly to Leah’s side and began to cry. You wondered how it was possible for one person to cry so much in such a short amount of time, and how his body didn’t shrivel up from losing so much water. You went over to Theo’s side and let him hold your hand as he sniffled, catching a few of his tears with the back of your thumb before they could sully the front of his shirt.

The boat ride felt long for you. Though it was summer, and the days stretched long, you could tell it was well into evening by the time you arrived. Although the first twenty minutes or so of the ride had been filled with exhilaration, you felt tiredness settling on your bones. It had been a long day, filled with too much stimulation. Theo looked even more exhausted than you did, holding a pudgy hand to his face as he yawned and struggled to keep his eyes open.

Yet, this sleepy peacefulness was pleasant only in its brevity. When the boat reached the pier you were shaken into full awakeness by the movement of people around you, and by Leah gently tugging you onto the island. While the effect of this change was lost on you, Theo seemed immediately relieved to have solid ground below his feet. So much so he didn’t complain when he was told there was still a way’s walk ahead of the both of you.

Drifting a few steps behind Leah and Theo as you walked the gravel roads, you took your time to examine the scenery. There was so much green, everywhere. Endless fields of green, dotted with yellows and whites and reds where flowers grew in unkempt patches of grass. A red light house rose up in the distance, standing out against a patch of trees, and a farm house barely visible from where you stood. It was all so different from the home you’d known before, and yet the loneliness of so much empty space surrounding a singular home was not unfamiliar to you.

Luckily, the walk was not an incredibly long one. A simplistic black gate, lined with white picket fencing, marks the end of your path. Beyond the gateway sits a snug looking house. It’s architecture is so old, you wonder how it survived in such fine condition all of each years. The exterior is white, with black trimming on the windows and a slanted brown roof. It looks to be made of stone, which might explain how it’s survived years of weathering. The house is more long than it is tall, but still appears to be two levels, wallflowers creeping up it’s side and tangling in the awnings.

A dog barks and you nearly jump out of your skin. The creature appears not a moment later- a border collie with black fur and a white face, its tail wagging through the air as it approached the gate. You take a step back out of impulse, but Leah and Theo did not seem to share your misgivings. They greeted the dog with smiles and a cry of ‘doggy!’ from Theo, making you scrunch up your nose as you watched him stroke the animal’s fur through the fence.

Once past the guardian of the estate, they made their way to door with the dog trotting by their side. It was several minutes of confused looks shared between them before their knocks were answered. The man who answers the door looks not unlike you and Theo. His hair is short, dirty blonde in color, it and looks like he hasn’t shaved in a while. He’s tall and thick and everything your father had never been, you notice with relief. He invites the three of you inside in a quiet, gruff voice, his German rougher than what you were used to.

He introduces himself as Adal, and Leah makes the point that the two of you are to address him by uncle. Theo nods his head obediently besides you, while you sigh. Adal is short spoken and quiet. He lacks the kind of silent intimidation that your father had always seemed to sport around strangers. He reminds you of a cat, sitting outside in a barn yard, happier in its lonesome and when left to its own devices. You don’t dislike him immediately, and you think maybe things won’t be too horrible here.

Leah does not stay for dinner, leaving shortly after she makes sure the two of you are settled. It’s a hug for Theo and a handshake for you- and then she is gone. You feel emptiness in your chest as you watch her walk back down the pathway. Adal does not show you around, nor does he ask any kind of questions. He does not seem particularly happy that either of you are there, but he makes no show of being put upon. He asks you to help him set the table for dinner and you do without complaint. You are far too tired and drained to complain.

For dinner you have bratkartoffeln*, which is surprisingly good. Your appetite hits you as if from nowhere when you smell it, hot and salty and delicious. You wolf your food down and sit kicking your feet as you wait for the other two. Theo eats just as quickly as you, but he is more polite in his table manner, and his small cheeks expand to squirrel like quality with each mouthful. You tell him he looks like a chipmunk, and he smiles at you with his mouth full. Swallowing, Theo makes sounds, you think, are supposed to be the chatter of a rodent.

But you are both tired, and you don’t play around besides that. Adal tells you that it’s fine to just go up to bed, now- he’ll take care of the dishes. He leads you up a flight of stairs to a small hallway lined with multiple doors. He lets you pick which bedrooms you want, since there’s enough empty rooms for you to both have your own. Both rooms are fairly similar; simplistic cubes with white walls and bare wooden floors. The beds in both are identical, plain double beds with white sheets and a pillow. Adal rubs the back of his neck as the two of you examine them and explains that he hadn’t had much time to prepare.

Eventually you settle on taking the bigger room when Theo doesn’t call it, the one with several large windows and a large closet on the wall by the door. Going through the motions of pre-bed procedure feels so uncomfortable to you today. The pajamas are familiar and smell like your bedroom back home- no, the place that used to be home- and the tooth bush you brought is well used, but the bathroom where you wash up is foreign. Likewise, the sounds of Theo moving around that you can hear through the walls. You run the tap water unconsciously to drown them out, and it restores a bit of familiarity, if only a little.

You don’t expect to have an easy time of falling asleep in this new bed, but not for the first time, you immediately feel exhaustion settle on your body. It’s only a matter of minutes until you’re drifting into a state of unconsciousness.

Then there’s a knock at your door.

Light seeps into the room from the hallway before you can tell whoever it is to go away. You thought that it’d be Adal coming to check on you or something, maybe a maid, although you hadn’t seen any yet. The figure in the door way is neither of these. The shuffles and shifts his weight from foot to foot as he looks up at you with wide, imploring eyes.

“I can’t sleep…”

You stare at each other a little longer before you understand what he’s asking you. Moving towards the walls, you lift up the blanket and pat the space besides you. Theo wastes no time in going over and climbing into the bed besides you. He asks if you can switch places and you oblige him with a grunt, settling down against the pillow as he clambers under the covers besides you. For a long time, the two of you are silent. You stare up at the ceiling as you listen to the gentle sound of Theo breathing besides you. Whatever the reason, his presence makes you feel suddenly hyper aware. It makes you feel…anxious.

It’s been a very long time since you slept with someone else in your bed. It was not the first time, though. Theo had climbed into your bed on several occasions when you were both younger, complaining of nightmares. You had never asked questions, curling your small body around his even smaller one. You had told him that he didn’t have to be afraid. That you were here, and if the monsters came for him that you would make your ugliest face and scare them away. It had become a game for the two of you when you scrunched up your nose and pulled down your eyebrows, baring your teeth in an Ugly Face. It would make Theo laugh, every single time, and on those nights you both slept better than you would have on your own. But now you’re older and things are different. Theo is still Theo, but the horrors in his dreams seem a lot more real than just monsters under the bed or in the closet… change was scarier than any fictious beast could ever be.

Theo moved in close to you and placed his head on the pillow besides you, gazing at you.

“I miss mom and dad.” His voice was hushed as his gaze turned downcast. You gazed back at him uncertainly, before you gentle brought up your arms to embrace him. Running your fingers through the scruffy patch of blond at the back of his neck. You cannot feel him, nor know if your body is warm and comforting to the touch, but you can imagine. You think you might hear the soft flutter of his heart.

“Me, too.” You assure him. It was not quite the same, for you. You had had to go through losing your mother and father a very long time ago. For Theo, however, you knew that this must seem a world harder.

“Do you think that they miss us?”

You stare at him evenly, at his round face and his quivering lips and the upward turn of his thin blonde eyebrows. There’s an ache in your chest.

“More than anything else,” you assure, giving a soft smile. If your parents missed Theo even half as much as you had, then you feel glad they don’t have to experience that kind of pain anymore. Not in the physical sense, where it bit at your heart, more than physical wound ever would.

“I’m going to take care of you, Theo.” You say softly, leaning your forehead against his. “I promise.”

_ _

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Adal is short for Adalbert, an alternate version of Albert.  
> Adal's house was referenced from this one: https://zjedzslowko.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/thatched_cottage.jpg
> 
> *bratkartoffeln: Fried potatoes, often with diced bacon and/or onions.

**Author's Note:**

> *Pellworm: (Danish: Pelvorm) An municipality on an island of the same name, in the district of Nordfriesland, in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. It's on the North Sea of Germany, with a population of roughly 1,200.
> 
> Chapters will be longer after this one, usually I try to do at least 2k words per.
> 
> Also, I know Theo's eyes are canonically green, but you'll just have to deal with them being hazel for this fic >:V


End file.
